Category: Uncategorized

any registered voter may vote as an absentee.

a person must be registered to vote in order to cast an absentee ballot

here is a great site for get everything you’ll need in just a few minutes.

i can think of two compelling reasons to vote as an absentee:

One:
this article suggests that ‘racial misgivings’ in the minds of otherwise democratic white voters may cause them to either not vote at all, or to vote for McCain because he isn’t black. this is extremely discouraging.

i wonder if the atmosphere of the polling site and voting booth, the environmental psychology of those spaces, if you will, won’t encourage the expression of such misgivings in the form of a vote based on them.

I’m imagining that in the isolation of the booth, within the unfamiliarity of the polling site, some may become a bit anxious. a vote cast at that moment, in those strange surroundings, may be more a reflection of that specific moment than a well considered gesture made with a clear mind for a better future.

perhaps, in the quiet of your home, you might be able to take a bit more time to think, and allow your choice to be a reflection of who you think is really the better candidate, and to acknowledge that a vote based on inner, hidden fears, biases, and stereotypes is essentially a vote for the continuation of hidden fears, biases, and stereotypes.

an absentee ballot may be the thing for you.

Two:
if you’d like to vote but know deep down that the prospect of leaving your apartment, going off-campus, waiting on a line, etc., are things that you won’t be able to get past, yet you feel this election is something you’d like to participate in, PLEASE consider an absentee vote. it is easy, and you can do it, basically, from your sofa.

a few things:

it seems most absentee ballot requests need to be received by mid-october.

a person must be registered to vote in order to cast an absentee ballot

here’s information for maryland: http://www.elections.state.md.us/voting/absentee.html,

submit the phrase: absentee voting to google and you’ll find appropriate information for your location, or, go here for a one-stop shop to get all the information you’ll need delivered via email.

What we are witnessing may be the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen — paper losses measured in the trillions of dollars. Corporate wealth. Oil wealth. Real estate wealth. Bank wealth. Private-equity wealth. Hedge fund wealth. Pension wealth. It’s a painful reminder that, when you strip away all the complexity and trappings from the magnificent new global infrastructure, finance is still a confidence game — and once the confidence goes, there’s no telling when the selling will stop.

Steven Pearlstein, from Scrambling to Clean Up After A Category 4 Financial Storm

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6Ca8reYEfQ[/youtube]
i am deeply saddened.

it is something close to me.” hiro yamagata

i think i completely mis-understood this quote when i just read it on yamagata’s site. i took him to mean that nature is, literally, and simply, whatever is close to him at any moment. that idea blew my mind because it suggest that the understanding of what nature is, is an ongoing process that varies over time and is not embodied in specific things, like trees or birds, but is everywhere and the realization of the natural comes from understanding the essence of nature within whatever is closest, whatever is pressing most firmly against one, at any given moment. to me that seems like a rewarding, knowledge enhancing practice.

but then i settled down and realized he was stating, simply, that he feels close to nature. oh, well… i think i’ll work with my misunderstanding for a while.

McCain and his crew are brilliant strategists. Palin has become a national fascination, how couldn’t she be? All the questions, all the resulting “huh?” from trying to parse her record with her story.

With no resolution or concrete understanding in sight, the din of the resonating media feedback loop she’s in the center of, and we’re pouring energy into, has hijacked this campaign and stymied the meaningful and very important national discussion about the differences between McCain and Obama, and where each plan to take our country if elected.

To me, I can’t help but think this was exactly the effect McCain et al wanted, and we are all complicit in allowing this to continue.

Of course it is important to know who the VP pick is, and what they stand for, but it’s also essential to know when we’re being played, and to respond accordingly.

A brilliant political maneuver, feeding us Palin, but inciting and leveraging our folksy and ignorant bravura, fears, and addiction to gossip as a means to become president suggests one candidate is doing this not for us, but for himself. If he’s willing to select a VP who’s moment of national fame probably should have come from a brawl with her family on the Jerry Springer show I strongly suspect that his behavior as commander and chief will be equally manipulative and self-serving.

Reaching out to our lesser selves will produce a lesser country.

We’ve already had eight years of that.

I don’t think McCain wants to be our president, I think he wants to preside. There’s a huge difference.

He has an agenda and, based on the way he’s run his campaign and political life over the past several years, seems to be willing to do whatever is necessary to make it to the oval office.

For the sake of our future I think it is essential that we bring the focus of the national discussion surrounding this campaign back to the essential challenges facing our nation, and how the two nominees plan to deal with them.

Taking four years off from working through the serious issues to be potentially amused by the antics of a politically savvy grumpy old man prisoner of war hero, and an inexperienced, say whatever it takes to win politician who seems to really believe not only her own bullshit but the bullshit others write for her, will be, in my opinion, a terrible, terrible mistake.

The more I think about it the more McCain/Palin = Bush/Cheney, and I don’t want four more years of that for you or me.

Less Palin, more (national, global issues)/(McCain v. Obama) = Future.

Maine TV/McCain Interview

Reporter does a fine job interviewing John McCain, follow the link, please.

For some additional analysis, see this.

here are some notes from our last (and first!) interactive scripting class:

We train to the medium and the medium trains to us.

Knowledge has a biological function, and arises out of action

Knowledge is basically “operative”–it is about change and transformation.

“Operative” knowledge is knowing about and learning from “what happens when I (or it, or they, etc.) do….”

Knowledge consists of cognitive structures.

Development proceeds by the assimilation of the environment to these structures, and the accommodation of these structures to the environment.

Movement to higher levels of development (knowledge) depends on “reflecting abstraction,” which means coming to know properties of one’s own actions, and coming to know the ways in which they are coordinated with other’s actions, and how one’s actions influence, and are influenced by, another’s actions and cognitive structures.

Interaction is a relationship of mutual influence.

Interaction can increase operative knowledge when it raises awareness of the degree to which one has influence over something while at the same time understanding how that something is influencing one’s self.

Our sense of identity, down to our recollections, beliefs, ‘private’ feelings, etc., may be evoked responses – aspects of a persistent, collective interaction with our environment, highly dependent on the moment, environment, and interactions occurring at a given moment. We may not, in other words, carry our memories, and specific personality traits as static objects into an environment. They may be, instead, patterns of responses evoked via interaction within a given moment, and within a specific environment.

Different affects and qualities of experience (including, it seems, memory, and other ‘private’ mental events) are evoked by interaction with specific combinations of environmental elements.

Interactive artists and designers benefit from careful study of the qualities of interaction that are evoked within given environments, and must think broadly about which combinations of elements, including human participants, gizmos, nature, etc., seem to evoke which qualities and understandings.

Development, and the resulting qualities of that development, proceeds by the assimilation of the environment to this knowledge and its related structures, and the accommodation of these structures by to environment.

We adapt to the medium and the medium adapts to us.

Internal/external paradigms are useful but one must bear in mind that interaction goes both ways, so that, ultimately, consciousness exists at a midway point between the internal and external.

i just returned from the Hirshhorn with a group of students. if you can, please see this exhibit, it runs only through sunday. there is a gallery talk with one of the curators friday at 12:30.

it ties into several ideas i’ve been working on lately that i will describe in detail a bit later.

in the meantime, if you have time, please do visit the show, and let me know what you think.

more info

in her speech last night sarah palin mentioned that:
hockey moms are pitbulls with lipstick.
she, apparently, is a hockey mom.
“dick cheney is the pitbull of the republican party.”
sarah palin is dick cheney with lipstick.
that’s the way she sounded to me.

the crowd responded passionately to her, in particular near the end when she said something about dealing with the terrorists and how her opponents were concerned with reading them their rights.

in class yesterday we talked about interaction, and how interaction is a relationship of mutual influence. we also talked about operative knowledge, which we defined as awareness to the degrees to which, within an interaction, you are influencing something AND how it is influencing you.

with the republicans leaning heavily on the pathos, heroism, and indignation they associate with McCain’s imprisonment and torture, i thought it strikingly short-sighted to suggest that not playing by rules designed to at least minimally acknowledge a prisoner’s humanity by making him aware of his rights while being held captive is somehow ok if we do it.

in general i found palin’s well written and well performed speech to successfully reach and stimulate my inner caveman.

it occurred to me that much of the rhetoric of the Right seems designed to resonate with that violent, uneducated, short-sighted, frightened cave dweller persona that lives in many of us, and then match that stupid thing with a candidate who seems to preach those very values as a code to live and govern by.

i accept my inner caveman. i prefer to have my leaders speak to, and inspire my thoughtful, empathic, productive identity.

also, at some point during her speech i actually thought i heard some people in the crowd chanting “four more years!”, maybe they were – would be a good protest chant at their appearances.

on my way into work this afternoon i boarded the train wearing a blue, striped, button-down shirt and green, cotton pants. the car i entered was crowded so i walked into another and took a seat. as i looked around i noticed that there were three people sitting in front of me with almost the same shirt that i was wearing. funny coincidence. i looked around a bit more and noticed that the car was almost full of people not only wearing a similar shirt to mine but the same type and color of pants, too!

as we entered each station some of them would get up to leave, and meet the eyes of their fellow workers and nod their heads as they left – several people met my eye only to give me a puzzled look when they realized that they didn’t recognize my face.

when i got up to leave i took another look and ended up making eye contact and nodding at a bunch of different people who seemed as puzzled as i was about this trivial but unusual event.

i’m writing this just before i start teaching and the students are filing in so that’s it for now.